Character actor Tom Wilkinson says he’s much better know in USA

Tom Wilkinson knows moviemakers can play around with the past from previous experience.

“There’s a scene in The Patriot (the Mel Gibson movie in which Tom played British general Lord Cornwallis) where the British are shown herding the Americans into a church and then burning it down,” he tells me.

“It never happened. The director was German.”

History is being made up again in Tom’s new movie, Belle, but this time to better effect.

It’s an extraordinary story where an illegitimate mixed-race daughter of an 18th Century Royal Navy Admiral was raised as an aristocratic lady by her wealthy and influential great uncle and aunt, Lord and Lady Mansfield.

But very little is actually known of Dido Belle’s life bar a few mentions in Lord Mansfield’s diary and a portrait in Scone Palace, family seat of the Mansfields, in which she’s seen standing alongside her cousin, a very rare example of a black person standing at the same height as a white person in 18th Century art.

The rest of the film had to be “imagined” although as Lord Mansfield, Lord Chief Justice of his day, Tom had a little more to go on.

“Lord Mansfield was an interesting man,” comments the twice Oscar-nominated actor.

“He was Scottish, certainly not from the aristocracy, and he worked his way up through the ranks by virtue of his academic and legal brilliance.”

Lord Mansfield’s most famous ruling came in what was known as the Zong Case in 1783, when an insurance company refused to pay out on 142 African slaves who had been thrown overboard by the crew of a Liverpool-owned slave ship, Zong, due to (they claimed) a lack of available drinking water during their voyage to the West Indies.

“On the one hand, there’s Dido, who he loves and who was born of a slave mother and in some way represents the slaves who were drowned by the owners of the slave ship,” observes Tom of Lord Mansfield’s predicament.

“On the other if he has the courage to say: ‘This is wrong,’ he knows this decision could destroy the foundation of people’s livelihoods if he rules against the slave owners, so he truly struggles with that decision.”

The period of history the 66-year-old is currently immersing himself in is much better documented. He plays President Lyndon B. Johnson in Selma, a film about Martin Luther King’s Civil Rights Movement in 1960s America.

He also recently played the father of Johnson’s predecessor, Joe Kennedy, in the mini-series The Kennedys in which he acted alongside his wife, Diana Hardcastle, who played Joe’s wife Rose.

Although the pair call North London home, Tom’s comfort acting on either side of the Atlantic comes from having left Yorkshire, the county of his birth, with his family when he was four to spend his formative years in Canada.

“I’m much better known in America, although I’m always amazed when anyone recognises me,” he says.

“Moving around a lot when I was a child meant I never had that sense of belonging to a region, an identity, which lends itself to being an actor and playing other people.

“The biggest influence Canada had on my career was that they didn’t have any age restrictions on which films you could see so I was one of a gang of kids who would go to the cinema every Saturday and see films like The Searchers and The Wild Bunch.

“We didn’t bother with the romances, Love Is a Many Splendid Thing, and things like that. They made some good movies in those days.”

The desire to be in films didn’t bite until he’d returned to Britain, attending the University of Kent and going on to the Royal Academy of Dramatic Arts.

“It became clear what I wanted to do with the rest of my life. After that it became a religion.”

In a 40-year career Tom has acted alongside the biggest names in the business, from Dame Judi Dench to Julia Roberts, Tom Cruise to George Clooney.

But his most important role is as a father to his two daughters, Alice and Molly.

“It was the making of me,” he says of becoming a dad at the age of 40. “I’d had a particularly chequered history with relationships prior to that and somehow the arrival of a child at that age, I wasn’t about to be unfaithful or leave the family or anything like that, I’d done all that stuff, so it felt like the perfect time for me.”

Belle is at cinemas now.

Our verdict 3/5

While Belle manipulates history for its own means, it is an engaging story a sort of Pride and Prejudice with racism and politics mixed in that writer Misan Sagay and director Amma Asante (a former Grange Hill actress) have concocted.

Tom Wilkinson, Penelope Wilton and Gugu Mbatha-Raw (who plays the young Belle) are all worthy of note in their roles and the ending, although rose-tinted, is particularly affecting.